


Lift. And. Paint.

by acertainlady



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alex Danvers Has to Fix Everything, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Gay Disaster Kara Danvers, Kara Danvers Wants to Help, Lena Luthor Also Has Terrible Timing, Lena Luthor Has Feelings, Lucy Lane is a little shit, Moving Sucks, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25825984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acertainlady/pseuds/acertainlady
Summary: “She’s going to try to impress you...She always tries to impress you, and it’s endearing, most of the time. The only times it isn’t are when she does something stupid that risks her safety, or when she does something stupid and it wrecks our new place.”“You’re afraid she’ll break your new house trying to show off in front of me?”“I know she’ll break our new house trying to show off in front of you.”ORDirector Sanvers move into a bigger place with help from the Superfriends, and Alex's instructions for Kara are very simple.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Lucy Lane/Maggie Sawyer, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 12
Kudos: 280





	Lift. And. Paint.

“We don’t need to move.”

“Yes, we do! Look at this closet. It is nowhere near big enough for all of our clothes.”

“Yeah, Danvers, there’s no way you could live in that one for twenty-seven years.”

“You’re not helping, Lane!” Maggie yells across the room before rearing back on Alex. “Look, I know moving sucks. Trust me, I don’t wanna do it either. But three people cannot realistically live in a studio apartment, no matter how much they love each other.”

“We’re barely ever here all at once, anyway.”

“No, but all our stuff is _always_ here. We’ve already tried paring down and reorganizing and all the other crap on your Pinterest page, and it’s not working. We need to move.”

Alex groans, flopping back onto the bed. “Moving sucks.”

“I know, babe,” Maggie sighs. “But in addition to the three of us, we have many wonderful friends who can be easily bribed with pizza and beer into helping us.”

“And two of them are super-strong aliens who can fly,” Lucy points out, sauntering up the step to sit next to Alex on the bed. “Plus James is strong, and surprisingly good at picking paint colors.”

“You _know_ Lena will jump at the chance to help us pick out fancy, beautiful furniture that perfectly matches our collective taste and then scare all the salespeople into giving us discounts on it,” Maggie grins, her girlfriends chuckling along.

“Yeah, and Winn…” Alex’s eyebrows knit together in thought. “Can install the wi-fi?”

\----

So two-and-a-half months later, they bid farewell to the studio Alex had lived in since graduating from college and head toward their new condo in a moving truck—after assuring Kara, once again, that no, they do _not_ need her to just pick the truck up and fly it to the new place, it’s only a few blocks, and it would be odd and slightly suspicious for the citizens of National City to see Supergirl helping people move. It was already suspicious enough when, while helping them load the truck, Kara forgot to hide her superhuman strength and repeatedly threw obviously-heavy boxes into the truck before loudly commenting, “Wow, you sure have a lot of pillows!”

J’onn, at least, remembered to have someone else pretend to help him carry the heavy stuff.

With the help of their aliens, Alex, Maggie, and Lucy manage to get most everything unloaded and inside their new place by the time James, Winn, and Lena show up, having readily agreed to turn their usual Friday game night into a moving-in party. After warm greetings and a quick tour, they convene in the kitchen, all standing around the island, to distribute drinks and tasks.

“All right, so Maggie and I are gonna get started unpacking the important stuff,” Lucy says. “Winn…will you please help us set up the entertainment stand?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” he grins goofily. “Not to brag, but I’m really good at putting together furniture.”

“We know, Winn, you’ve mentioned it forty-seven times since you agreed to help us move in,” Alex teases.

Winn blushes, and James comes to his rescue. “I’ll help him out. Take care of the manual labor while he’s doing fancy tech stuff.”

“Sold,” Lucy nods. “But we will want you and Lena to help us decide on paint colors first.”

Now he blushes, slightly, clearing his throat. “Yeah. Cuz art.”

“Oh, come on, masculinity is a social construct, don’t get all insecure. You’re a photographer, obviously we value your aesthetic sense,” Maggie groans, rolling her eyes. “Besides. Danvers is way more masculine than you, and we all know it’s no use trying to outdo her.”

Alex’s eyebrows shoot halfway up her forehead. “Excuse me?”

Choosing to ignore her girlfriends, Lucy continues to direct the team. “Anyway, Alex is gonna be taking care of the long list of random fixes she made and won’t let us hire anyone to take care of—”

“Oh! I can help!” Kara squeals, actually raising her hand in her eagerness.

“ _No_ ,” Alex scolds. “Kara. We talked about this. What are you allowed to do?”

The blonde’s face falls into a pout. “Come on. I thought you were exaggerating; I’m not new to the planet anymore, I can do more things.”

“Kara. _What are you allowed to do_?”

Looking away, Kara doesn’t answer, and Alex scoffs.

“Hey, I’m sorry, okay? I love you, and I know you have the best intentions, but the DEO is a little more demanding than high school was. I don’t have time to put up new windows or rewire whole rooms or do whatever else it takes to fix the damage you cause when you get too excited or impatient trying to help out around the house.”

The Kryptonian is still pouting, but the Superfriends are too busy staring at Alex in awe to notice.

“I’m sorry,” Lena inserts herself politely, too curious to refrain from asking: “Why would you have to rewire a whole room?”

“It was one time!” Kara asserts, slightly hissed through her teeth, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’d only been on this planet for, like, two years.”

“After our dad…” Alex trails off, vaguely gesturing with her non-beer-holding hand before continuing, “I took up most of the stereotypical patriarch chores. Yard work, fixing stuff, taking care of the car. Kara, being Kara, felt guilty and wanted to help, so I started to let her do what I thought would be the easiest tasks for her, but she…struggled. Especially with Earth’s… _primitive_ technology.”

“I’d never seen a lightbulb before I got here!” Kara all but shouts. “On Krypton, if you needed more light, it just happened!”

Lena’s eyes widen, and her mouth opens and closes a few times like a fish before she finally is able to speak. “I’m so torn between asking how more light ‘just happened’ on Krypton, and asking what happened the first time Kara tried to change a lightbulb.”

“Ask the second question,” J’onn counsels her from across the room, thus far having been content to keep moving boxes to their destined locations, but feeling the need to chime in here. “That kind of otherworldly technology is nearly impossible to explain to humans.”

“Earth electricity is stupid!” Kara summarizes, stuffing pizza into her face as consolation for being so thoroughly teased. Lena takes pity on her, snaking her arm around her girlfriend’s waist, but also persists in her curiosity.

“Okay, so then, Alex…what exactly happened the first time Kara tried to change a lightbulb?”

“Yeah,” Winn smirks. “How many Kryptonians does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Alex snorts. “More like how many lightbulbs does it take.”

Kara groans, turns red, buries her face in her hands (or, well, _hand_ , because she continues to shove pizza into her mouth with the other).

“She broke five in a row before somehow managing to blow out all the wiring in our mom’s study.”

Maggie raises an eyebrow. “Heat vision?”

“Nope,” Alex shrugs. “I have no idea what she did, but long story short, that’s how I learned, at the grand old age of sixteen, to cut open walls, rewire an entire freakin’ room, and put walls back up.”

“I helped with the tearing down of the walls, for the record,” Kara clarifies.

“Not to sound like a one-trick pony,” Lucy drawls. “But why didn’t Eliza just hire someone?”

Alex rolls her eyes dramatically. “Oh, come on. What was she supposed to do? We genuinely didn’t know if what had happened could be passed off as normal, or if when we called up Jim the electrician to come fix it, he would encounter something he’d never seen before and force us to stumble through some flimsy explanation that didn’t reveal how my alien sister had accidentally fried a room dark because she twisted a lightbulb in too hard while trying not to break the glass.”

“Lightbulbs make no sense!” Kara maintains.

“Getting back to the moral of this story,” Alex says curtly. “Kara. What are you allowed to do?”

Pouting once again, Kara mumbles, “Lift and paint.”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Alex sighs. “If I need your help with anything else, I promise I will ask you, okay?”

“I’ve been on this planet almost fifteen years. I can help more than carrying heavy things and reaching high spots without a ladder.”

“Yeah, those are my things,” James jokes, trying to dissipate the sibling tension, but the older Danvers keeps a tight glare directed at her alien sister.

“Lift. And. Paint.”

Then, curiously, Alex’s eyes flit toward Lena, briefly, before returning to Kara with one eyebrow crooked. Whatever this interaction is, it causes Kara to blush and turn away from the group, mumbling some excuse about helping J’onn finish moving boxes and furniture to the proper rooms.

And since they’re already fed and holding drinks, James and Winn head toward the living room to begin their tasks, and Maggie and Lucy make some obvious excuse just to leave the room, subsequently leaving a transparently uncomfortable Lena alone in the kitchen with her girlfriend’s sister.

Clearing her throat gently, Lena offers, “She’s getting much better at knowing her strength. Especially since I met her.”

“Yeah, maybe don’t tell me how you’re determining that,” Alex mutters as both of them blush.

“I—no, I just—she’s been so excited. About helping you.”

Alex smirks slightly. “Honestly, Lena? I’m not worried because of her.”

Lena’s face screws up in confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

Shuffling between her feet rather uncharacteristically, the normally unflappable agent tries to reconcile the fact that she’s diving into a discussion regarding her baby sister’s love life. “You two are…new. Not so much timeline-wise, but…I’ve never seen my sister act toward anyone the way she acts toward you.”

And Lena expects her to elaborate, so when she doesn’t, the tinier brunette shrugs and asks, leadingly, “Okay…?”

“She’s going to try to impress you,” Alex says, as if it should be as obvious to her as if she said ‘you’re breathing air’ or ‘gravity holds you down.’ “She always tries to impress you, and it’s endearing, most of the time. The only times it isn’t are when she does something stupid that risks her safety, or when she does something stupid and it wrecks our new place.”

Lena unwittingly releases a barking laugh. “You’re afraid she’ll break your new house trying to show off in front of me?”

“I _know_ she’ll break our new house trying to show off in front of you.”

Biting her lip, Lena reluctantly asks, “Should I leave?”

“No!” Alex rushes. “You don’t have to—I just—it’s easier for everyone, this way. Kara is…stubborn. Especially when it comes to helping.”

“It seems to run in the family.”

Alex smirks. “Stay, please. Let Kara do her lizard pushups or bring you the shiniest rock or whatever the Kryptonian courtship rituals are. It makes her happy. _You_ make her happy.”

Avoiding eye contact, Lena smiles demurely. “Okay.”

“Okay,” the agent sighs. “Now I’m gonna go try to impress my girlfriends by fixing things they think I don’t know how to fix.”

Lena chuckles lightly as her girlfriend’s older sister leaves, then takes an extended moment to celebrate the fact that she just had an entire conversation with Alex about her relationship with Kara without getting threatened even once. In fact, it was quite the opposite—Lena had been quite, quite afraid of Alex since the moment she realized she might see Kara as a little more than a friend. Because, frankly, Alex Danvers is terrifying under most circumstances, so when the circumstances are that you are dating her little sister, Alex Danvers should be your worst nightmare.

Except, to her credit, the incredibly intimidating federal agent (who happened to have the ability to throw people into impenetrable cells deep within a secret government black site) has yet to explicitly threaten Lena, and the ever-curious CEO can’t help but wonder why.

Alas, those are questions for a different time. So, Lena sets off to find her girlfriend, knowing she’s in for a treat. Kara is nothing short of a vision at any point in time, but when she goes out of her way to show off, well…Lena’s only human. Besides, Lena has a soft spot for pouty, doe-eyed, “ _why can’t I just do everything for everyone all the time?_ ” Kara, so the two combined will undoubtedly prove satisfying.

Lena quickly finds her favorite alien in the spare bedroom, which has been predestined as an exercise room/office/place to store their excess weapons, apparently, because when she walks in, Kara is carrying a large gun safe under one arm and a folded-up treadmill over the other.

“Hello, darling,” Lena beams, unable to stop herself from blatantly objectifying her strong, powerful, beautiful girlfriend. “I’d offer to help, but…”

“No, I got it!” Kara grins dorkily, her eyes appraising Lena’s body before settling on her face, her own, tanner face screwing up into one of confusion. “You’re drinking a beer.”

Lena tilts her head. “Yes, I am. Is that okay?”

“Yes! No, I just—yes. Of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Kara takes a deep breath, steadying herself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—it’s just you normally don’t drink beer. You drink fancy whiskey or red wine, or if we’re out at a bar that doesn’t have the kinds of whiskey or wine you like, you’ll drink gin and tonic, but you don’t normally drink beer, is all.”

Lena warms at the attention to detail, and she’s suddenly overwhelmed with the need to kiss her girlfriend. Nobody—nobody since her mother, her real mother, the one who’s been dead for over two decades—has ever paid such effusive attention to her or her habits for any non-nefarious reason, and though a small twinge in the back of her mind reflexively tells her to worry, she knows she doesn’t have to, because Kara couldn’t hurt a fly, let alone a fly she cares about.

But her insecurities still hold her back, so instead of uttering the three words that immediately came to her mind following her girlfriend’s considerate observations, Lena offers a logical explanation.

“They haven’t unpacked the glasses yet; I didn’t want to be a bother.”

“Oh,” Kara hums, walking over to the corner to place the gun safe down, keeping the treadmill hoisted around her shoulder. “Do you want me to find them? X-ray vision makes unpacking way easier, I promise, I can find them in only a few seconds, if you—”

But then Lena is crossing the room, because insecurities and unstable childhood be damned, she has found the perfect woman and she’ll be damned if she isn’t gonna kiss her right now. So she captures Kara’s lips with her own, demanding their attention for as long as she can until her stupid lungs demand she stop.

When she finally pulls away, she looks deep, deep into Kara’s dumbstruck, glittering eyes, and she takes the leap. The leap that she always promised herself she would never take, the leap that always seemed foolish and ill-advised and destined to go poorly.

Her trust issues, her history of betrayal, her cynicism, they all tell her, have always told her, for her whole life, not to do this.

But Christ, she’s met her match with Kara Danvers.

So she takes the leap, and she says it first.

“Kara,” she breathes, their lips inches away, their eyes locked passionately. “I love you.”

\----

Alex is installing a lock on the bedroom door. Because she has an alien sister with a tendency to fly into her apartment without warning, and she also has two girlfriends who are not too fond of this habit, but thankfully, the balcony of their new place is located off the living room, so when Kara flies in, she’ll have to go all the way down the hall to get to the bedroom—which, honestly, won’t completely eradicate little-sister-flying-in-on-sex incidents, because there’s still kitchen sex and living room sex and all kinds of other room sex, but at least it will significantly decrease the frequency, especially since the walk from the balcony to the bedroom might remind Kara to announce herself more than she ever had time to when flying into the studio.

Anyway, Alex is installing a lock on the bedroom door. That’s what she’s doing when she hears the loud, loud crash echo through the hall.

Immediately pulling the small handgun from her work boot, she bolts down to the source of the booming sound, barreling into the spare bedroom with no hesitancy—until, of course, she sees the scene she’s up against.

Hot on her heels, Lucy and Maggie pull up, their own weapons drawn, only to have the same reaction as Alex.

Because Lena is standing, looking more like a deer-in-the-headlights than she has since she started living with the Luthors. Her hands are raised to declare innocence, her eyes flitting between the three women with guns drawn; her sheepish, blushing girlfriend, still holding a folded-up treadmill; and the giant ass hole in the wall caused by said treadmill being carelessly handled by the Kryptonian, a hole through which Lena could see James, Winn, and J’onn, all staring incredulously into the spare bedroom, waiting in fear for Alex’s reaction.

“Lift. And. Paint,” the redhead growls. “I made it so simple. How could you possibly— _what_ did you—?”

“It’s not Kara’s fault,” Lena pipes. “It’s—I told her I love her, and then…well, surely it’s quite obvious what happened next.”

“Aww,” Lucy chuckles. “That’s adorable.”

And as Alex lowers her weapon and pinches the bridge of her nose, Maggie whistles, then mutters, “Wow, put the Danvers sisters in front of a pretty girl and they just completely forget how to function, huh?”

“I’m so sorry!” Kara yelps, apparently just tuning back into reality. “I—I will fix it, I promise, I just…I don’t—I didn’t—”

Then her eyes dart toward Lena, whose face falls, as if fearing the worst. She clears her throat, straightening her shirt and her posture quite dramatically before announcing, “I think I should go.”

As she turns on heel, Kara drops the treadmill to the ground with a loud _bang_ , running to intercept her girlfriend’s path to the door.

“No!” the blonde stammers, her face the picture of panic. “Please, Lena, I—you—please—you, me…how do I even—?”

Alex steps forward, placing a gentle hand on Kara’s shoulder to stop her from completely short-circuiting. “That’s flustered Danvers speak for she loves you too.”

Lena softens a little, biting her lower lip and daring to look into the clearest blue eyes she’s ever seen. “Is that true? Do you?”

And Kara, with her full-on, dopey puppy dog face, nods mutely but enthusiastically, almost too enthusiastically, almost to the point where if she were human, she’d break her own neck nodding so enthusiastically. “I do. A lot. I just—I didn’t think you would—”

“Of _course_ I do, Kara,” Lena assures her, closing the space between them, circling her arms around her waist. “How could I not?”

Their lips meet in a passionate kiss.

“Aww, that’s _so_ adorable!” Winn comments from the other side of the giant hole.

“It’s getting less adorable,” Alex grimaces at the sight of her baby sister tongue-deep in Lena Luthor’s mouth. “Either stop making out or go home and spare me the sight of you making out.”

They burst apart, blushing and fumbling.

“Sorry,” Lena breaks the silence, because obviously, of the two of them, she is the first to regain her composure in this situation. “We’ll behave.”

Kara makes no attempt to hide her pout, and Alex winces, but otherwise ignores it.

“We made a commitment to help, darling,” Lena quietly reminds her girlfriend, before snaking an arm around her waist once again and lowering her voice even more. “Besides, we have the whole weekend…”

“I can’t read Kryptonian minds, but I can read your mind, Ms. Luthor, so could you please, _please_ do me a favor and think quieter?”

J’onn’s voice rings deep and echoing through the condo, and it appears to be Alex’s last straw as she mumbles under her breath and leaves the room, pushing past her two girlfriends, who wear matching, devilish grins.

“H-how does one ‘think quieter,’ exactly?”

“We’ll teach you,” Lucy offers. “Maggie and I got really good at it back when Alex and I worked in the desert together.”

“You are not as good at it as you think,” J’onn scoffs.

“Or maybe you just underestimate how much we actually think about having sex with your protégé-slash-surrogate daughter.”

And, well, that does the trick in shutting up the Martian, at least.

“Right,” Maggie interjects. “Well, we’ll leave you two to…um…finish with this room. Lucy and I have some stuff to unpack in our room. Right, Luce?”

“Right.”

They scurry into the bedroom, where Alex is knelt on the ground, concentrating very deliberately on installing a new doorknob.

“Moving sucks,” she grumbles at them. “And having aliens help you absolutely does _not_ make it suck less, you liars.”

“We’re sorry, babe,” Lucy frowns, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Oh, by the way, if J’onn has trouble looking at you for the rest of the night, that’s my fault, okay?”


End file.
